A furious flourish of feathers, a skirling blast of ranchero music, a vicious uppercut with the strapped-on knife, and it was already over. Right through the ribs on the first winged leap. It happens like that sometimes. Other times it can go on forever, two stunned roosters with blood-matted plumage lurching in for a kill with their last trickle of life. Anyway, there hadn’t been many bets on the first fight.
Benito’s crew could have used the extra seconds for preparation, though. This pit barely tolerated teenaged fighters and Nacho was already giving them an eye like he was going to flag them off. Standing there with their cock only half-heeled. Men were already laughing and jeering. ¡Apurate, wey! ¡Arrre, burro! Ben held his bird firm and gentle, took his cue from its incurious calm. It wasn’t fazed by the animal roar of wagering and distorted music after weeks of training to the sound of a cranked-up boombox.
Monke, whose stolid face could have been a poster–“Mexico’s Proud Indigenous Heritage of Displaced, Unwanted, Illiterate Indios”–shook the other navaja out of its box, and wiped its curved razoredges with a slice of lime. Nabo, his fierce predator eye attuned to the instincts of the birds he so admired, had already slipped the moleskin sock on the stub where the big giro’s spurs had been amputated: now he carefully set the little dagger’s socket of the stub and lashed it in place with dental floss. Too low and the tips might drag on the floor, too high and they might strike with the back of the blade instead of the wicked, honed tip. He tied off and nodded: the bird was heeled. And Nacho was waving them into the pit impatiently. The other gallo was waiting.
Ben stepped into the ring wearing his straw Stetson copy, the brim carefully pinched and crushed into the ever –so-cool Tejano beak. He kept his stolen sunglasses on in the gloom of the cockpit, a teenager’s defense against the eyes of elders. He looked around at a ring of dark-faced factory workers and taxistas raving as they placed bets and waved money. Drunken dorks sweating in a nasal swirl of norteño music.
He accepted Nacho’s glare, nodded to the other gallero, and held his cock out towards it’s opponent—“flirting” the birds into a macho killing rage. The other bird’s ruff of red throat feathers went up like an umbrella popping open around the basilisk eyes while the cruel beak screamed outrage and deathwish. The two surging cockades of hatred flashed back and forth under the low-hanging light bulbs, straining forward in the handlers’ grips. Ben leaned close to the seething gold plumes of his own enraged bird, whispering urgently as he whipped its inbred lust for supremacy into an explosive bundle of genocide.
“Vamos, tesoro,” he crooned over the screams of the crowd and the distorted ranchero music that echoed through the pit. “You’ve already won, my little beauty. Te amo, you gorgeous little winner.”
The sudden hush came, then the motion from the arbitro. Two sets of hands opened and two birds launched towards each other powered by strong strokes of wings, their feet slashing in figure-eight patterns, each foot delivering an inch of steel bayonet. They’d done a damned good job breeding and training this bird. It fought like a flurry of demons, slashing and pecking not only for its own life, but the lives of offspring yet to come. It was a programmed killing and impregnation machine with a stonecold refusal to die. But all cocks are like that and in every fight one has to die.
Ben slammed out the door of the pit, stalking across a dirt yard full of old tires and rusting hulks of pickup trucks. He was so furious he’d forgotten that he held a dead chicken until Monke offered him a joint. He glanced down at his hands and saw the forlorn clump of bloody feathers, took two steps and slamdunked the dead cock into an oil drum half full of green water. Then ignored the joint as he paced and raged.
“I can’t believe it! We’re fucking broke! All that training…”
“Next time try incubator, training, Güero,” Monke told him stoically, “The only kind that pays off.”
Ben glared down at him. He was taller than his compas, and so light-skinned that the “Güero” nickname was inevitable. Tall, solid, nice-looking seventeen year old. But in no kind of mood.
“He’s right,” Nabo tossed in. “Give it the right parents and you’ve got a winner.”
He ambled over to Monke, proffering the joint. There was something stocky and thick about Nabo’s build, but he moved with the fluid grace of an athlete and looked out at the world through dark feral eyes in a face as stern and rounded as old basalt heads in Yucatan jungles.
Ben was still furious at being left without a peso in his pocket because of some damned bird. “¡Carajo! We needed that money to buy the chiva we’re supposed to sell those asshole yuppies. In like two hours.”
“¿Yupis? What kind of fucked-up gringo word is that?” Nabo demanded truculently. “What does it even mean?”
“What do you want to call them?” Ben replied testily. “¿Fresas? What does that mean? They’re strawberries? Get off my ass.”
“The point is, we don’t have any dope to sell them,” Monke reminded them.
Nabo slid a switchblade from his pocket and into the air with one smooth movement. It sprang open in mid-toss and fell into his waiting hand. “Who says we really need any dope?”
Ben looked at him and cracked up. All three boys were laughing and roughing each other up as they headed past the weathered old cowboy who guarded the pit with an ancient shotgun. Ben picked up his machete at the broken wire gate, slipped it down the back of his shirt and tossed his hair over the handle. As they turned up the mud street of one of the most derelict colonias of Tijuana he reached out for the joint and sucked in a powerful slug of sweet smoke.